Digging For France by Adrian Jennings

I just got back from Cambridge Silicon Radio’s Locations & Beyond Summit in San Francisco. This was an invitation-only event gathering over 200 global location industry experts and executives to discuss “connecting everything, everyone, everyplace in a location aware world.” I was honored to be asked to make a presentation about Ubisense’s Tri-Mode Tag as a finalist in the “most innovative device” contest.

As it happens the Tri-Mode Tag (OK: I succumb – TMT) was designed very much with the goal of connecting everything, everyone, everyplace, so being invited to the conference was either a testament to the vision of Ubisense’s engineers and perceptiveness of the conference organizers, or a stroke of good fortune sufficient to make me nervous about crossing the road for fear of the universe attempting to redress the balance. I prefer to put it down to vision and perception.

The evolution of the TMT was very much an “inside-out” process, first locating objects indoors and then venturing outdoors as user demands expanded. The first mode of the tag uses UWB for very precise location. This mode was and still is predominantly used indoors where the installation of fixed infrastructure is possible, but it’s also increasingly used to cover areas around the outside of buildings too. The second mode added was a 2.4 GHz “proximity” mode, giving approximate location with sparse infrastructure. We see this deployed in large indoor structures, but it also has reach much further from buildings when deployed outdoors. The third mode in the TMT adds a GPS module to set the tag free of any terrestrial infrastructure altogether for location anywhere.

The story I heard at the summit sounded like the same thing played backward: an “outside-in” discussion of the need to expand on GPS ubiquity by taking location services indoors. I think just about every speaker made the following observations in one shape or form: GPS has been so successful that location services have become an expectation rather than a desire; people increasingly want to extend these capabilities indoors (most smart phone use is indoors these days for example); and different applications require different levels of location accuracy. Stated another way, there is a strong need for multi-technology devices that provide various levels of accuracy both outside and in.

It’s all a bit like digging the Channel Tunnel really. Here in the RTLS industry we started out on the UK side, locating devices indoors with ever increasing precision. When users asked us to track those same assets outdoors we started digging for France. In the GNSS industry, GPS started out on the French side, locating devices globally, and when users started to want the same services indoors, the industry started digging for England. The real tunnel met in the middle through a sophisticated laser alignment system; the location services tunnel is being connected by devices like the TMT.

To coin a resuscitated phrase: I love it when a plan comes together!